This time tomorrow I'll be in Scotland, back amongst the landscape of those first autumns. There were autumns before of course, but I don't remember them - I was five when we moved to Scotland and anyway, one of them was spent in Malta, a distinctly un-autumnal country.
I wonder what this return will be like? My only other return to Scotland - over the summer of 2005 - marked a profound shift in the intensity of my predilection toward hyperthymesic obsession. Or in other words, my ability to 'move' into the past, in an 'imaginative' or 'mental' sense, was heightened considerably after my previous trip. It is quite hard to explain. I thought everybody did this until recently... What it boils down to is a constant awareness of a personal - or autobiographical history. There is the present day - where I am now - and usually two or three threads of my own history, almost overlaid onto the present day. This usually centres on a place in a specific time - my room in Woodstock Drive on a rainy Sunday during adolescence, the alleyway leading up from Drumduan Park to the Black Woods on Christmas 1984, London Road hill in Worcester, curving up at the base of twilight. These 'pasts', these other histories (or rather geographies of those histories - memories of other people rarely feature) are a constant and sometimes overwhelming presence, and have always been - though they grow stronger as I grow older oddly enough. All time seems to happen at once somehow. These remembered places seem sideways from here - landscapes attached to the present landscape, but that cannot be reached physically, except through the act of remembering. This is why these returns (Ickenham, Worcester, Stone, - and Scotland tomorrow) are so fascinating. They feel like visiting a mythical place where all the myths are hiding but leave their shadows behind.
It's getting late, It feels like autumn, and tomorrow night I won't be in England any more.
